He was dead for several minutes, on a steel table in the ER. The doctor shocked the pulse back into his heart and dropped him into an induced coma, but it still wasn't clear whether he would make it. As I stood by his bedside, shaking, one of the nurses touched me on the shoulder.

"Maybe it's better this way," she murmured.

I'll never forget that moment. We'd been watching a movie together a few hours before. We had plans to go clubbing. Maybe it's better this way?

I'm not a violent person, but I wanted to punch that lady in the face.

When I started going out with Mike, I thought that prejudice against people with disabilities was something we'd left behind along with Jim Crow and sodomy laws. I was shocked, again and again, to find that I was wrong. So wrong. Everyone I met had ideas about what it must be like to date Mike — that we never went out, that we couldn't have sex, that I must have to take care of him all the time — that were so false as to be laughable. We did laugh at that stuff. We had to. But for every person who came up to us to congratulate Mike on his "bravery" in taking a trip to the mall, there was someone who actually thought he'd be better off dead.

Some of those people were doctors.

Not the young doctor who fought like a demon to restart his heart in the ER. But there were others: well-meaning doctors who saw Mike, and people like him, as pitiable — as "bad outcomes." In fact, that's the norm: study after study has shown that doctors, as a group, consistently underestimate the quality of life of their disabled patients. Those prejudices — unquestioned and unacknowledged — can have disastrous results.

I don't know anyone born with a serious disability whose doctors didn't tell their parents that they would never be able to live independently. A doctor at Mass General, who treats children with muscular dystrophy, told me about colleagues who had counseled their patients against using the ventilators that would prolong their lives by decades. Those doctors weren't trying to do harm. They simply saw their patients' lives as not worth living.

As disability activist Carol Gill writes: "Many of us have been harmed significantly by medical professionals who knew little about our lives, who thought incurable functional impairments were the worst things that could happen to a person, and who were confident they knew best."

All this, then, is why I'll be voting against referendum Question 2, the Death with Dignity Act, on November 6.

The language of the bill sounds reasonable: it would allow doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication, upon request, to patients with terminal diseases. But it wouldn't actually have much benefit for the dying, who already have the same access to self-administered suicide as anyone else. Instead, it could present doctors with an option to offer the patients they think they can't help: the bill's definition of "terminal disease" is so vague as to encompass disabilities like Mike's, and it has no requirement that a person seeking the fatal dose see a counselor or be screened for depression.

Follow the leaders While we won't have George W. Bush to bash for the national trials that await us in 2009, we can learn important lessons from his past failings.

Democracy in China That December morning in the year 2010 began oddly. The sun rose in the west. The river reversed itself and flowed upstream. The tide went out and didn't come back.

Uh, race still matters, folks In a few short days Barack Obama will go from being our first black president-elect to our first black president. Yes siree, the black guy is finally going to be in charge. We finally did it. Welcome to post-racial America!

Inauguration Day Round-up Most people round these parts will be celebrating President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20. But, even those rare local GOPs who are mourning the loss of a Republican administration will be looking for a good time.

We started nothing The first thing you have to understand about how the Maine Legislature works is: It doesn't. And it isn't supposed to.

Question 2 backlash heats up Since Question 2 was activated on January 2, it's been difficult to walk the streets of Massachusetts without encountering red-eyed hordes of marijuana-blazing vagrants.

COMMUNITY’S STATE OF PLAY | February 05, 2013 By the time you read this, NBC's brilliant, neglected stepchild of a sitcom will back on the air, having survived its creator's firing, various scheduling debacles, and the epic flouncing-off of Chevy Chase.

BEAUTY AND THE GEEK | November 08, 2012 Geek is now chic, and the Internet is filled with female makeup artists who draw inspiration from superhero comics, video games, and science fiction.

THE JOY OF SMUT | October 17, 2012 The porn here is explicit, character-driven, and polymorphically perverse.

CELEBRATING ROMAN TOTENBERG | October 09, 2012 When not reporting on the Supreme Court for NPR, Nina Totenberg has spent the last few months working with her two sisters to plan a memorial for her father, Roman.